World People's Blog

Linked with Opium of the masses – part 2.

Eric Walberg is a journalist and writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. He tells on his own website: If you want to see me in action, you can watch a panel discussion about the Annapolis meeting between Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli PM Ehud Olmert: TV Debate, Middle East: Part 1, 5.25 min; part 2, 7.17 min. … (see also all his other videos on Youtube).

He writes: … While Georgians see themselves as part of Europe, “the whole history of Georgia is of Georgian kings writing to Western kings for help, or for understanding. And sometimes not even getting a response,” said its thoroughly Westernised president, Mikheil Saakashvili, in a recent interview. “Not just being an isolated, faraway country, but part of something bigger”. With a population of 4.7 million, this beautiful land, noted for its dozen or so hot-blooded independent-minded peoples, is surrounded by at best indifferent neighbours Armenia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and of course Russia. Its fiery 40-year-old president does not disappoint, with his penchant for thumbing his nose at Russia and lavishly admiring US President George W Bush … (full text, May 7th, 2008).

His personal Website.

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Eric Walberg – Canada

Heart of darkness: Afghan Resistance against Foreign Occupation, June 4, 2008.

… For sceptics about the possibility of some form of LHOP/MHOP, just consider the following: if indeed 6,000 elite business leaders control the world’s fate, surely such an immensely wealthy and powerful coterie could solve the food crisis in a flash. The massive expenditures on arms and the wanton destruction they cause every second, could, if stopped, provide the will and resources to restructure the world to end starvation, let alone poverty, leaving lots left over for the elite to wallow in. There is no organised force of any consequence opposing this world elite. What’s stopping it? (full long text about food crisis).
[Explanation: « Made it Happen On Purpose » (MHOP) … and: « Let it Happen On Purpose » (LHOP) …]

Silent tsunami, May 17th, 2008.

Twenty years ago this week the Soviet Union began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, eight and a half years after it was invited by the desperate People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which had degenerated into intra-party squabbling and was beset by Islamic rebels massively financed by the United States. The straw that broke the Soviets’ back was when the US began providing Stinger missiles to Osama bin Laden and his friends … (full text).

He asks: « Is there more than meets the eye in the sudden flurry of talk about a world food crisis » … (full long text).

… Eric wrote to me, and I fully agree with his view: « My philosophy of journalism is that it should help shape the historical dialectic. Indeed, I hope that our arguments reach Russian political types and help support the Good in Russian politics – renewing the anti-imperial stance of Soviet Russia. It’s not at all a sure thing, with the strong Zionist lobby in Russia which continues to press and fight Putin. His is not yet primarily a principled position, but the principles have becoming stronger the past few years, as he wrestles with both the domestic and international dragons » … (full text, July 8, 2007).

His personal Library.

Continuer la lecture de « Eric Walberg – Canada »

Linked with Mother Earth’s Triple Whammy.

John Feffer serves as Editor of “Foreign Policy in Focus” the journal of international relations administered by the Institute for Policy Studies . Mr. Feffer has written numerous books, including North Korea/South Korea: U.S. Policy and the Korean Peninsula, and articles on the politics, economics and security of East Asia and the world. He is a central figure in the debate on US foreign policy today … (full text in Korean and english).

John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

… For the last 20 years, John Feffer has written on a range of topics from Russian economy and Korean literature to U.S. food policy and the global economy. His shorter essays have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, The Progressive, Salon, Newsday and The American Prospect. He has also edited several books, including the FPIF collection Power Trip and The Future of U.S.-Korean Relations from Routledge. Before joining IRC, Feffer was a Writing Fellow at Provisions Library in Washington, DC and a PanTech fellow in Korean Studies at Stanford University. Feffer studied in England and Russia, lived in Poland and Japan, and traveled widely throughout Europe and Asia. (full text).

He says: « I was first led to the study of North Korea because of my interest in communist systems. I studied in Moscow in 1985 and lived in Poland in 1989, which gave me a first-hand opportunity to witness first the Gorbachev reforms and then the Solidarity-led transformations. I was curious why the North Korean state did not collapse in 1989 or later during the food crisis of the mid-1990s. This curiosity led me to conduct further research and, eventually, to take several trips to North Korea » … (full interview text, ).

His Website.

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John Feffer – USA

America’s Foreign Policy Bubble, June 16, 2008.

He writes: Locavores – the latest trend in dietary activists – speak of reducing “food miles,” of sustaining small farms, of the better taste of produce grown or raised locally (Feffer, 2007). It’s not just Europeans. North Americans are beginning to follow the European lead in prizing local products. Local sourcing – with its application of the term terroir to products other than wine and the rapid growth of direct farmer to consumer marketing through consumer-supported agriculture (CSAs) – has taken up the same radical challenge to factory farming that the organics movement raised a generation ago, but with an additional critique of the global agro-assembly line. In a reversal of the old relationship between emperors and their dominions, people are nowadays assigning greater value to items produced locally … (full text).

Scott Horton Interviews John Feffer, February 13th, 2008.

He says also: … « We urgently need a change in U.S. policy toward North Korea and toward East Asia more generally. I hope that my book will, first of all, raise the profile of Korea on the agendas of progressive organizations in the United States (and in Japan, Germany, and Spain where the book is being translated). I rather doubt that North Korea, South Korea will find its way onto the bookshelves of any Bush administration officials. But I hope that some of the critiques and some of the alternatives find their way into the mainstream debate on these issues in this country. The fact that the book has garnered interest in South Korea has made me quite happy about the undertaking. If we are in the same terrible impasse in November 2004, with the United States continuing to play a negative role on the peninsula, then I would feel very discouraged » … (full interview text, January 1, 2004).

Beyond Detente: New Options on East-West Relations, 232 pages, 1990.

Continuer la lecture de « John Feffer – USA »

Linked with the Jewish Women’s Archive JWA.

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches. She was lionized as a free-thinking « rebel woman » by admirers, and derided as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution by her critics. Born in Kaunas, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), to an Orthodox Jewish family, Goldman suffered from a violent relationship with her father. Although she attended schools in Königsberg, her father refused to allow her further education when the family moved to Saint Petersburg. Still, she read voraciously and educated herself about the politics of her time. She moved with her sister Helena to Rochester, New York, in the United States at the age of sixteen. Married briefly in 1887, she divorced her husband and moved to New York City. Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman was trained by Johann Most in public speaking and became a renowned lecturer, attracting crowds of thousands. The writer and anarchist Alexander Berkman became her lover, lifelong intimate friend, and comrade. Together they planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Though Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman herself was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for « inciting to riot » and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth … (full huge long text).

She said: If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution » … (on wikipedia/Legacy/picture script); … and: « I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things » … (in jwa.org); … and: « The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society » … (in all posters.com).

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Emma Goldman (ca. 1910) – Lithuania-Russia-USA (1869 – 1940)

The Emma Goldman Exhibit: Women of Valor.

… She dreamed of a communistic society where everybody contributes according to ability and takes according to need. During World War I she was arrested because of organizing an anti-draft campaign. In 1919 she was deported back to Russia with other anarchists. Even being first a supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, she became fast disillusioned with the oppression of free speech and the party rule. Her, in 1923 published book « My Disillusionment with Russia » was one of the first real critiques of the Soviet System. She left Russia and spent the rest of her life in Canada and Europe. She died on May 14th 1940 … (full text).

Her book: My Disillusionment in Russia, 1923.

… She was educated in East Prussia and in St. Petersburg, where she moved with her family in 1881, months after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Goldman lived in a world ruled by fear and the ubiquitous secret police, a world in which even the mildest expression of dissent would be summarily crushed. As a teenager, she began to embrace the ideas of the Russian revolutionary movement. The movement imagined a society of free equals, a tantalizing Utopia in which all problems could be solved on earth, by ordinary people. Its proponents were committed to removing a Czarist regime at any cost … (pbs.org).

« Union Square is Not For Sale » Declare Activists, June 7, 2008.

Continuer la lecture de « Emma Goldman – Lithuania-Russia-USA (1869 – 1940) »

Linked with The RealNews.com, and its newest McClellan’s testimony matter.

Aijaz Ahmad is a well-known Marxist literary theorist and political commentator based in India. Born in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India just before it gained independence from British rule, Aijaz Ahmad along with his parents migrated to Pakistan following partition. After his education he worked in various universities in US and Canada. At present Aijaz Ahmed is Professorial Fellow at the Centre of Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi and is visiting Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. He also works as an editorial consultant with the Indian newsmagazine Frontline and as a senior news analist for The Real News Network, … (or theREALnews network) … (full text).

He says: … « The first option, I think, the time is gone for, actually, negotiations with the Taliban. The time to negotiate with the Taliban was when they were weak, that is to say, soon after the invasion, when they were in disarray. Today they control virtually as much territory as the Karzai government does. Secondly, I think the resistance from the Karzai government and many other of those tribal forces will be far too great for a real settlement with the Taliban, because the structure of power in Afghanistan has changed completely. Now drug lords are inside the government, outside the government, and so on, and a stable government in Afghanistan of that kind is actually not in their favor. I think that time is gone. So far as the other option, the pincer movement, is concerned, that is what actually a part of the Pakistani establishment is willing to do » … (full interview text).

Find this 4 Videos Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism, November 16, 2007, Toronto:

• Part one: Introduction by Leo Panitch, 11.11 min;
• part two: Aijaz Ahmad, 18.30 min;
• part three: Sabah Alnasseri, 17.33 min;
• part four: Q+A with Sabah Alnasseri and Aijaz Ahmad, 10.06 min.

Read: ISLAM, ISLAMISMS AND THE WEST, 37 pages.

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Aijaz Ahmad – India

His book: In Theory, Nations, Classes, Literature, by Aijaz Ahmad, 368 pages, 1994.

… The Cuban revolution was one of the key events in the political formation of my generation, just as the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973 was in its negative impact a decisive moment in the history of the global Marxist left. The more recent Latin American developments have been seen in India as both a certain return to what one might call “the Cuban moment,” but also the rise of a very different kind of left. My own writings on Latin America have been designed strictly for an Indian readership and try to grapple with just what this new left, in all its variations, is … (full text).

Video: US troops in Pakistan, 8.47 min.

… THE hastily confected judicial assassination of Saddam Hussein, the last President of independent Iraq, was part of an extraordinary three-month-long offensive that United States President George W. Bush has mounted on all fronts, domestic and international, since mid-October 2006. That offensive has now culminated in the invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian proxy of the U.S., massive U.S. bombings of Somali territory by huge U.S. cargo planes that have been turned into gunships, and the “invitation” by the puppet regime, which the Ethiopian proxy has imposed on Somalia, to the U.S. to send its troops to this newly occupied country. A “new” Eastern Africa is now as much a U.S. objective as is a “new” West Asia. An integrated offensive from the Caspian Sea to the Mombasa Bay, so to speak … (full text).

Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia, 366 pages, 2000.

… Culture is not reducible to those processes that Marxist political economy studies for its own purposes, but culture is embedded in those processes. The so-called « mass culture » today is quite inseparable from processes of mass production, marketing, profiteering, systems of mass communication, etc. Every social practice and all material production involves signification, but neither communication nor fashion nor any other of those things that Cultural Studies takes as its specific object of study is merely or even mainly a signifying practice. Nor can the relation between cultural production and its basis in economic and political processes be read off anecdotally or epiphenominally; it has to be studied rigorously and structurally. You can’t just throw in a bit of economics here, a bit of technology there; you have to be able to locate individual facts in a complex historical process, and for that you need very considerable theoretical preparedness. In its beginnings Cultural Studies was quite aware of all this, and some have sought to remain true to those very prosaic origins. In the main, though, Cultural Studies has itself become one of those many styles of consumer capitalism that it sets out to study … (full text).

Carter says Israel has 150 nukes – Aijaz Ahmad: Why is corporate media marginalizing a former president, May 30, 2008.

Continuer la lecture de « Aijaz Ahmad – India »

Linked with Fear and strange arithmetics.

Saskia Sassen (born January 5, 1949 at The Hague, Netherlands) is an American sociologist and economist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is currently a professor of sociology at Columbia University and at the London School of Economics. Sassen coined the term global city. She is married to the sociologist Richard Sennett. Sassen grew up in Buenos Aires where her parents Willem Sassen and Miep van der Voort moved in 1950. She also spent a part of her youth in Italy and says she was « brought up in five languages » … (full text).

She says: … « The notion of globalisation does not adequately capture this transformation, which leads on to the question, where, precisely, is this foundational transformation happening? My answer is, to a large extent, within, not outside, the architecture of the nation state. Yes, there are novel global formations, but they are thin compared with the nation state, the most complex structure we have produced historically. I think some parts of today’s transformation are partial, contradictory, incipient – they have uncertain trajectories and may well collapse, even as others thrive » … (full interview text).

Global Networks, inked critics, 19 pages.

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Saskia Sassen – USA and Netherlands

Public Interventions … .

… She has recently completed a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for UNESCO. The project established a network of researchers and activists in more than 30 countries and is published in the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems EOLSS.net. She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and Chair of the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, The International Herald-Tribune, and The Financial Times, among others … (full text).

More around the themes she is writing about: international trade; and nation states; and rural depopulation; and transnational/transnationalism; and urbanization..

The goal of a negotiated global open migration policy would be to make universal what is already the reality for the affluent everywhere, making what is now a privilege for some a universal right for all (see Saskia Sassen, « Migration policy: from control to governance, » 13 July 2006). This is not a new proposition. It has been the subject of serious discussion in academic and policy circles for years. Indeed, an ambitious extended debate within openDemocracy, focusing on the reform of European migration policy, included contributions from many policy analysts such as Liza Schuster and Franck Düvell, Nigel Harris and Saskia Sassen, arguing for variations on the proposition of open borders. Still, the issue is a hard sell, and in spite of the manifest failure of present policies and practices, serious consideration of the alternative at the political level has not been achieved … (full text).

Work and the Global Economy: Listen to the Entire Program, September 2, 2002.

Continuer la lecture de « Saskia Sassen – USA and Netherlands »

Linked with The RealNews.com, and with Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment.

Gore Vidal (born October 3, 1925; pronounced /ˌgɔər vɪˈdɑːl/ or /vɪˈdæl/) is an American author of novels, stage plays, screenplays, and essays, and an erstwhile political candidate. He is an outspoken member of the American political Establishment, and a noted wit and social critic who wrote the ground-breaking The City and the Pillar (1948) that outraged mainstream critics as the first major American novel to feature unambiguous homosexuality … (full text).

He says:  » … « Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies » … and: « (Lying is) the one thing I hate most on this earth. Which is why I do not have a friendly time with journalists » … (find many more dialogues in this text).

His latest book: selected essays of Gore Vidal, June 18, 2008.

Author Gore Vidal will speak with Jay Parini, author and Vidal’s literary executor, on Tuesday, June 24, 2008, at the Writers Guild Theater as a part of TOWN HALL’s ongoing Writers Bloc series … (full text, June 12, 2008).

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Gore Vidal – USA

N.Y. Times Magazine Publishes Charge That McCain’s a Phony POW, June 16, 2008.

… “Gore Vidal is America’s premier man of letters,” proclaims Jay Parini, himself a poet, novelist, critic, and biographer. Parini is also an editor, and his pronouncement constitutes the opening sentence of his introduction to a volume of vintage Vidal. If “man of letters” sounds too much like postmaster general, the collection at least confirms Vidal’s preeminence as virtuoso of the essay. He is also a redoubtable novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and memoirist … (full text, June 18, 2008).

Gore Vidal and the Art of the Political Insult.

He was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in West Point, New York, the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal Sr. (1895†»1969) and the former Nina S. Gore (1903†»1978). His birth took place at the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy, where his father was the school’s first aeronautics instructor, and he was christened by the headmaster of St. Albans, the preparatory school he would attend in his youth.[1] His second middle name honors his maternal grandfather, Thomas P. Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma … (full text, June 16, 2008).

Spacey adds Shrink to packed schedule, June 17, 2008.

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Erwin Wagenhofer is born 1961 in Amstetten, Lower Austria, graduated from the Vienna Institute of Technology TGM, Department of Communications Engineering and Electronics worked for three years as developer at Philips Austria, Video Department 1983–1987 freelance director and assistant camera operator for various productions, feature films and documentaries at the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) since 1987 freelance writer and filmmaker … (full bio).

He says:  » … the idea came from an earlier project. We were making a film called Operation Figurini about an art project which took place at the local markets. From the beginning we had planned to make a detailed documentary of Vienna’s markets. When it came time to write the script or do the treatment for this film, I wandered up and down the city’s markets and I thought: what is it about markets that’s so interesting in the first place? And the only thing that interested me was the products. Where does all that stuff come from? The original idea was to start at Vienna’s most famous market, the Naschmarkt, and to look behind the scenes. Where does that stuff come from, where do the tomatoes and all the other products come from? And we actually began with the tomatoes. We did our research and that’s how we ended up in Spain. We just did the tomato story first …  » (full interview text).

Picture Gallery of ‘we feed the world‘.

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Erwin Wagenhofer – Austria

Tout enfant qui meurt de faim est … assassiné – Étant donné l’état actuel de l’agriculture dans le monde, on sait qu’elle pourrait nourrir 12 milliards d’individus sans difficultés. Pour le dire autrement : tout enfant qui meurt actuellement de faim est, en réalité, assassiné. » Les mots de Jean Ziegler, rapporteur auprès de l’O.N.U. sur le Droit à l’alimentation tombent comme un couperet … (scenes et cinés.fr).

ERWIN WAGENHOFER’S BEST MOVIE.

He writes: Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread sent back to be disposed of is enough to supply Austria’s second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivation of soybeans to feed Austria’s livestock while one quarter of the local population starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated greenhouse vegetables from southern Spain, with water shortages the result … (full text).

He says also (… about Jean Ziegler): It’s interesting how that came about, because I found Ziegler first. I’ve read his books and followed his TV appearances for years and have great respect for his work. But I chose Jean Ziegler for only one reason–or rather, he interested us for only one reason–and that’s because he works at the UN. Because Jean Ziegler as Jean Ziegler would immediately put everything into the left corner, but since he has this high UN function, that of Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food… that made him interesting for the film. I wrote Jean Ziegler a letter, and because he’s an admirer of the French Revolution, I sent the letter on the 14th of July. I worked a long time on that letter, and two days later he called me. We met in Geneva that October … (full interview text).

Filmography on the NY Times.

Continuer la lecture de « Erwin Wagenhofer – Austria »

Linked with The Charms of Wikipedia.

Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist, his writings focus on minute inspection of his characters’ and narrators’ stream of consciousness. His unconventional novels deal with topics such as voyeurism and planned assassination, and they generally de-emphasize narrative in favor of intense character work. Baker’s enthusiasts appreciate his ability candidly to explore the human psyche, while critics feel that his writing wastes time on trivia (Stephen King notoriously compared Baker’s novel Vox to a « meaningless little fingernail paring ») … (full text).

His author spotlight on random house.

… The lies, according to Kurlansky, were told by the leaders of the democracies, especially Roosevelt and Churchill. Baker had shown, “step by step, how an alliance dominated by leaders who were bigoted, far more opposed to communism than to fascism, obsessed with arms sales and itching for a fight coerced the world into war” … (full text, June 6, 2008).

The Video with Charlie Rose in May 9, 1994, about sex and the death: with Erica Jong, Robert Olen Butler and Nicholson Baker, 58 minutes, added March 7, 2007.

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Nicholson Baker – USA

A Debunker on the Road to World War II.

… The novelist Nicholson Baker’s customary style in books like “The Mezzanine” and “Room Temperature” is to observe the world in slow, painstaking detail, relishing the tiny moment, enjoying the aside for the sake of accuracy, insisting on charting the precise state of things. He has now applied this system to history, to the few years before the United States declared war on Japan and entered into World War II as a full participant. It is clear Baker has not done this as a literary exercise, nor as a new way of amusing himself and his readers, but because of a passionate view of how the war against Germany was conducted by Britain under Winston Churchill … (full text, March 23, 2008).

Even the staunchest opponents of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are loath to take issue with World War II, the quintessential conflict between good and evil that became the model of a morally just war … (full text, June 12, 2008).

… To research his new book, “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization,” which comes out next week from Simon & Schuster (March 2008), Mr. Baker read old newspapers online and on microfilm, and he lso borrowed hundreds of books from the library at the University of New Hampshire, about 20 minutes away in Durham, which had granted him professorial privileges. Until just recently, when he began to cart them back, they were all stacked in Mr. Baker’s barn: piles of Churchill; of Herbert Hoover’s postpresidential papers; war records, biographies, letters, diaries … (full text, March 4, 2008).

Was WWII A Good War? June 14, 2008.

Continuer la lecture de « Nicholson Baker – USA »